Skepchick Quickies, 9.5

Mulvane winery, feds settle elderberry juice case: “A federal judge has approved a settlement in a civil lawsuit filed by the government against a Kansas winery over claims about the medicinal benefits of elderberry juice concentrate.” (From Allen.)

15 Comments

The feminists in collage told me the 16th and 17th century explorers forced women to start shaving to make them look more like the native women they’d encountered. Looks like yet another historical fact that doesn’t stand up to critical examination.

The headline of the Yeti story completely fails to summarize the article. There is nothing in the story to indicate that government believed the Yeti actually exists.

The State Department published 3 rules for any Americans who wanted to go storming around in the Himalayas looking for Yetis. Two of them were to obey local Nepalese regulations, and the 3rd was either the same or simple common sense: 1) you needed to get a permit. 2) Don’t go shooting at stuff except in extreme self defense. 3) If you actually find something, report it to the Nepalese government.

I know not shooting at random unidentified creatures is very un-American, but it’s their country, not ours.

Nope – it was all about making themselves sexually attractive to men. Here’s the reference, translated by Ian Johnston, from Aristophanes’ “Lysistrata”:

[Lysistrata speaking]:
If we sit around at home
with all our make up on and in those gowns
made of Amorgos silk, naked underneath, [150]
with our crotches neatly plucked, our husbands
will get hard and want to screw.

Wasn’t the government also studying the viability of psychic warfare in the 40’s and the 50’s? It shouldn’t be surprising that they ‘believed’ in yeti, though as Buzz just pointed out, the document was a fairly generic/standard code of conduct.

Did everyone miss this line from the yeti piece? “Tom Slick, a millionaire with a specialized interest in cryptozoology paid for three separate expeditions in Nepal to find the snow beast, immortalized in the 1964 Christmas classic Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”